The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  Although his voice was firm and managerial, I realised he felt as sheepish as I did. As I yawned and blinked and acted out the process of waking up, he said, ‘What will the company’s reaction be?’

  This threw me. I snapped awake. The company? What did he mean?

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they took a dim view of what’s happened.’

  Why would they care? It was a newspaper company. Newspaper people were more broadminded than that.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Don’t be surprised. Many companies don’t like that sort of thing. It reflects badly on people.’ Then, the trouble confronted, he turned and left the bedroom and went off to work.

  The marriage took place on a sharp, sunny Friday morning on the first day of spring. The ceremony took only ten minutes at the registry office, followed by an early lunch in a small private room at the Hotel Charles in North Perth. Three photographs were taken on the family camera in the deserted hotel carpark. Ruth wore a creamy beige suit and hat, my mother wore funereal dark blue. Ruth’s mother didn’t attend. Neither did my brother, Bill.

  Bill wasn’t being prudish or standoffish; he had no idea the marriage was happening. I’d been warned to keep it quiet. He hadn’t been told anything. Just a month off his fourteenth birthday, he was regarded by my parents as too impressionably adolescent to take part in a celebration of flagrant immorality – even one so low-key and doleful. Fortunately it was his school-term break and he was holidaying on a friend’s farm for a week. Until he returned, and asked where I was, they could postpone telling him we’d suddenly got married, and why.

  They were all for putting things off. For keeping things under wraps. On the other hand, Jan was allowed to come. She was only eight, young enough for the occasion to wash over her.

  At the Hotel Charles we had prawn cocktails and Chicken Maryland and my mother put on a brave face. There were no speeches. A waiter officially served me beer for the first time. After my first mouthful my mother said giddily, to no one in particular, ‘He’s getting tipsy!’ It’s a wedding, I thought. That’s what you do. I remembered there was nothing they could do about it. I felt better at that moment than I had for weeks.

  In mid-afternoon my parents drove us to the airport where we caught the little plane to Rottnest for our weekend’s honeymoon. We were still in our wedding clothes. It was the first time either of us had flown to the island; like most people we’d always made the crossing by ferry. We held hands across the aisle for the whole flight: it took only fifteen minutes.

  The room allotted to us at the Rottnest Hostel was the room where I’d called on Roberta Ainslie. I’d never stepped over the threshold then. It felt strange standing inside the room this time. I peered out onto the grass of the Quad where I’d tried to remove the carpet shark’s teeth, as if the boy two years younger might still be squatting out there jabbing away with his spear, and appearing too keen, and making a fool of himself. The late afternoon temperature was surprisingly crisp, long shadows fell across the grass, and the Quad itself, off-season, was green and deserted instead of bright and sandy and sprinkled with slow-moving barefooted people.

  It was also strange being on Rottnest so quickly, without the gradual transition of the ocean passage, and in a suit and tie, and with a woman wearing a beige suit and stockings and high heels and her hair newly tinted and sculpted for the occasion. And being married to her. All I recognised was the powdered oval of her face. But before we knew it we were in bed.

  That weekend while we were at Rottnest my mother found us an out-of-the-way flat up the coast at Waterman’s Bay. This was suburbia’s northernmost point. Any further away and we’d no longer be living in Perth.

  From the small kitchen window we looked out onto a glaring limedust track to the beach and over the rocky shore to the ocean. In front of us, to the east behind us, and to the north, lay white sand drifts which piled up against the fence and shifted in the wind. There were no plants on the property. We had our backs to the desert and we faced the sea. Now we were people of the dunes.

  Everything inside and outside the flat was painted green – the asbestos roof, walls and ceiling and the flat’s cement floors. The yard outside was also green cement. Each room sloped towards a drain in the floor so that when old Mr Coleman, the landlord, felt the impulse to saturate his property he could hose down the flat’s bedroom, kitchen and dining room as well.

  Mr Coleman was rarely spotted without the hose in his hands. He might have been a resident of the dunes but he wasn’t one of the Sand People. He wasn’t submitting to the sand without a fight, and because he was retired he could give it his full attention. It was a constant battle in the sea wind, with the sandhills hovering and shifting at his borders. But by cementing everything over, painting it green and continually sluicing it down, he not only kept the dunes at bay, he restrained the very idea of the dunes.

  His need to defy the landscape started with his own green-painted house at the front of the yard. Inside the house, of course, the carpets, fittings and furnishings and Mrs Coleman’s knick-knacks were various rainforest shades. When I came to pay the rent each Saturday morning he gave me a glass of crème de menthe.

  With its cold cement floors and the constant hosing our flat had the atmosphere of a big laundry. That and the hour-long bus ride to town kept the rent so low that I could just afford it, even on my first-year cadet reporter’s wage. In the green flat we went into exile. Up here we were less likely to cause embarrassment to others or incite gossip.

  I was sure this had been my mother’s thinking when she found the flat. Ruth and I didn’t admit to each other that the snubs and giggles and scandalised whispers were happening. But Perth’s gossipy, conservative, country-town mindset saw us as seriously aberrant. This was a town where the most talked-about aspect of the Cottesloe–Nedlands murders was a barmaid and a married man being in a parked car together. Ruth and I professed not to care, and were sensitive to every whisper and slight.

  At Waterman’s Bay we thrived in our breezy, damp conditions. The spring weather was warming up. We cooked on a portable camp stove and treated life like a camping holiday. Sometimes we borrowed the car and went to the drive-in, and on the way home we stopped and made love in the sandhills. We saw From the Terrace and, deeply affected by the idea of adultery, sang Ray Charles’s ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ all the way home.

  Apart from some early morning sickness, Ruth stayed well. At weekends we swam in the morning, and I pushed her back up the sandhill to the flat. Then, as Mr Coleman drenched the green cement outside, we lay in bed and giggled about his hosing habits and the perfect name of the place.

  On the paper I’d returned to the Monday-to-Friday day shift, reporting the Perth police court, and when my older colleagues went to the pub after work I came home early to Ruth. As soon as I walked inside, we locked the door and pulled the blinds in case Mr Coleman thought an interior hosing might be warranted. As the sea wind whistled through the green window frames we leapt into bed at sunset.

  One early morning I dreamed I was paralysed down one side – and when I woke in fright I was. Arm, leg, foot, side of the face, tongue, cheek, were all numb and floppy. As if my body was divided down the middle by a dotted line, I could feel my good half and my bad half.

  It took all the strength of my good half to slide and drag my bad half upright and out of bed. What had happened to my brain? Revenge of the meningitis? Stroke? I was perfectly conscious but the thickness in one side of my tongue prevented me from forming words and talking. In a panic, Ruth called my parents, who called Dr Cyril Fortune, the neurologist and my meningitis saviour. By the time I saw him the pins and needles had left my bad side and contracted into a severe headache, which made me vomit, upon which all feeling and clarity of speech returned and I felt exhausted but strangely refreshed.

  While Dr Fortune taped me up to the electrodes of the electroencephalogram he questioned me about my recent health. Any strange sensations and nervous tensions?

 
; It was unnerving to discuss this but I mentioned a sensation I’d been experiencing lately during sex: a sort of nervous spasm in the legs, a kind of wild involuntary kick. But I didn’t say the word ‘sex’. I cleared my throat and said ‘marital relations’. The only way I could describe the sensation, I told him, was like the enthusiastic reflex kicks a dog makes when you scratch its belly.

  ‘Hmm,’ Dr Fortune pondered. ‘Dog-belly reflexes.’ How many times had this sensation occurred?

  I was too embarrassed to say how many times a day. ‘Every time lately,’ I said.

  His eyes widened but he didn’t say anything for a moment. I had electrodes all over my scalp. He was about to throw the switch and make the flashing lights come on in my brain. Maybe my blushing cheeks would short-circuit the machine. ‘Any other changes?’

  ‘Only getting married,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘And your age is?’

  I told him. I lay there feeling like an experiment. After a moment he said, ‘I think I get the picture. No need to go at it hammer and tongs.’

  A while later I got the results of the EEG. Dr Fortune said there were no obvious abnormalities indicated in my brain. The kicking-dog reflex didn’t return. My good and bad halves merged again.

  My mother was occasionally laughing. And for the first time since her children were born she was playing tennis again. She made a wry face at the pat-and-giggle social game she thought she was reduced to these days, but I thought it was a good sign. She seemed almost her old self.

  Then one afternoon when I called in unexpectedly at Circe Circle I found her deep in conversation at the kitchen table with the Reverend Keith Dowding. He was the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Western Australia. I hadn’t thought of her requiring spiritual guidance, or of turning to the Presbyterians, or of going straight to the top when she did, for that matter. But he was the only churchman she knew. His son and I had been in the same class at school. They had met at our sporting events. The Reverend Dowding was a warm, charming man, a liberal, a leading member of the State Labor Party and a prominent anti-nuclear demonstrator. I thought it might have cost her some pride to call him.

  Their conversation broke up when I walked in. Although it seemed to end on an optimistic note, I guessed from her full ashtray it had been lengthy and serious and – from the box of tissues by her coffee cup – that she’d been crying earlier. It was a year since the last time I’d walked in on her like this, when the man soothing her was a detective-sergeant.

  Shortly afterwards she left to stay with her parents in Melbourne for six weeks. On the face of it this wasn’t unusual: she went nearly every year. But not for so long, or so early in the year, or when Bill and Jan were just starting back at school. It was obvious to me – she’d left her return date open – that she’d timed the trip so she’d be away when the baby was born.

  Ruth’s waters broke conveniently at nine o’clock one Saturday morning at Waterman’s Bay and our little boy, a breech birth, was born by mid-afternoon. Afterwards they were both tired but well. Dazed with wonder, I phoned from the hospital with the news. My mother was across the country and my father was at the races. My brother and sister were off with friends. Eventually I reached the elderly housekeeper who was looking after the family while my mother was away, and I told her.

  I’d anticipated the scene. After all, I’d seen it many times in films and comics. The glazed and happy new father passes around cigars. His family and friends slap him on the back and ply him with drinks. People toast the baby and congratulate the parents. A fuss is made.

  Those movie and cartoon fathers were always much older, of course. Nervous, baffled saps with collars awry and five o’clock shadow, haggard from pacing the hospital corridors. James Stewart and Dagwood Bumstead types. After the birth they celebrated too hard and friends humoured their proud blustering and put them to bed on somebody’s couch. The labour-ward nurses didn’t frown at them and ask, ‘Are you her young brother?’

  When he came home from the races and heard the news my father said he was glad ‘everyone’ was well. He asked what name we’d chosen. I said James. He didn’t offer congratulations or open a bottle. He certainly didn’t suggest he go to see his first grandchild. He said he had to have a shower and go out again. There was some shindig at the golf club. He was making the most of my mother being away.

  I’d decided to stay at Circe Circle to be nearer the hospital, so after visiting hours that night I drove up to Waterman’s Bay to get my clothes. The wind had dropped and the dunes lay motionless up against the side and back fences. Mr Coleman had been busy: the usual sheets of water puddled and glistened along the length of the yard.

  I sat on the doorstep of the flat and leaned back against the green door and drew breath after the day’s events. I was still awestruck at our little boy’s existence. I envisaged our lives together. When he was eighteen I’d be thirty-six. In a proud stupor I repeated his name to myself.

  The moon shone in the sea below and in the puddles all around me. It was shaped halfway between a fingernail and an orange segment and in my dazed reverie I wondered why film directors never avoided the cliché of the full moon for momentous events. When their romantic or insane or terrified characters looked to the night sky for confirmation of their moods they had only one chance in thirty-odd of seeing a full moon but somehow they always did. A big blue-white bugger of a moon, too, and much closer to the earth than I’d ever seen it. It looked as if it was moored about a mile offshore.

  The Colemans’ light was still on so I splashed up to their house, knocked on their door and told them the news. It surprised me how pleased they seemed to be. They were in their nightclothes but they invited me in.

  ‘What a lovely day for your little boy to be born,’ Mrs Coleman said.

  Mr Coleman shook my hand and brought out the crème de menthe and we toasted him.

  I brought Ruth and the baby home to Circe Circle the next Saturday. My mother then immediately returned from Melbourne. She arrived late on Monday night. We were all in the house together. Ruth and the baby were given Jan’s bedroom. Jan was on the spare bed. I was back sharing the bedroom with Bill over the Doghouse, sleeping in my old narrow bed.

  The wooden bed-head had been painted over, but under the paint, I knew, were the slightly raised and voluptuous outlines of Brigitte Bardot, Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe. Also Marlon Brando, James Dean, Alfred Hitchcock and Paul Newman as Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me. I’d thought I was pretty shrewd back then pasting up the pictures of Brando and the other males as cover and balance for Brigitte, Ava and Marilyn. For about a year not a day had passed when I didn’t think of Bardot in And God Created Woman. But displaying such come-hither-looking women on their own would have been asking for trouble.

  The next morning, Tuesday, my mother saw our son for the first time. She held him and said to no one in particular, ‘Who does he look like?’

  That morning, after nursing him, Ruth slipped into bed beside me. She was wearing again the negligee and nightgown she’d brought on the honeymoon. Seconds later my mother appeared and said we shouldn’t cuddle in front of Bill and Jan. She advised us to keep to our separate bedrooms.

  That afternoon she played tennis with her friends at the courts behind Dymock’s Store in Adelma Road. It was getting into autumn, cooler but still sunny. If it hadn’t been for the leaves from the poplars bordering Mr Palmer’s summer cinema gardens (recently closed until November) falling on the courts, the tennis conditions would have been perfect.

  Early next morning, Wednesday, my mother drove Bill to the school bus stop. She arrived home complaining of a headache and lay down on her bed. She called me into the bedroom and said, ‘Your baked beans are on the stove.’ Then she fell unconscious.

  My father didn’t know about her headache. He was busy with his sixty-minute chest-clearing, shaving, toilet and shower routine. When she became unconscious I got such a fright that I phoned Dr Synott at home. But he
didn’t arrive; he didn’t seem to understand the urgency. I phoned him again, and then I interrupted my father’s ablutions. He appeared from out of the steam, took one look at my mother and called the doctor himself. This time he came. As soon as he saw her, he called an ambulance to take her to hospital. That afternoon she died. Boiling brain had finally got her.

  CHAOS

  My mother was a good swimmer. As a young woman she’d been a lifesaver at Frankston in Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, at a time when female lifesavers were quite a rarity. She still knew her resuscitation methods and rescue drills. When I was small I’d play a game where I pretended to be drowning. I’d yell out, ‘Help!’ She’d throw her left arm diagonally over my chest and under my armpit, or cup my chin in her hand and, breathing steadily, sidestroke me to the safety of the shore.

  Some grown men and women remember their mothers as the scent of face powder, or the mingled scents of the inside of a handbag, or perhaps as a particular rustle of fabric after the good-night kiss. My mother was the smell of salt water, warm tanned flesh and the satiny femaleness of her bathing costume. She was the faint perished-rubber odour of her bathing cap.

  The family albums showed her vigour and athleticism. She’d played competitive tennis, recovered from a broken pelvis in a show-jumping accident and enjoyed highboard div ing. The diving came as a surprise to me when I was twelve and old enough to have few illusions about parental heroism. She’d never mentioned it.

  We were picnicking one Sunday at Yanchep, north of Perth, and had gone swimming in the pool of the Yanchep Inn to cool off after lunch. My mother swam her usual laps, then suddenly she left the water, climbed the high diving tower, stood poised way above us, frowning slightly, and jack-knifed perfectly into the pool. The rest of us were bobbing in the shallow end – my pale, outclassed father, my brother and sister and I.